Articles & Videos

  • 10 Best Intranets of 2014

    Intranet team sizes continue to grow at a slow but steady pace, while smaller organizations are producing the best intranets. Focusing on Agile development and wireframing methods, intranet teams are completing design and deployment within much shorter timeframes.

  • 3 Guidelines for Search Engine "No Results" Pages

    When users get 0 search results, there’s a high risk of site abandonment. Better design can turn this UX disaster into an opportunity for content discovery.

  • Minimize Cognitive Load to Maximize Usability

    The total cognitive load, or amount of mental processing power needed to use your site, affects how easily users find content and complete tasks.

  • Charrettes (Design Sketching): ½ Inspiration, ½ Buy-In

    Design charrettes inspire design sketches and ideas, include more people in the design process, explore and expose goals and objectives of colleagues in multiple functional roles, and drive off designer’s block.

  • 5 Tips for Avoiding Confusing Category Names

    Category and link labels should tell users what will happen when they click on them.

  • How to Run a Usability Test with Users Who Are on Your Site Now

    Learn how to use tools like ethnio and GoToMeeting to recruit participants while they’re on your site and immediately run moderated usability studies.

  • Smartwatches Are the Future—But Samsung Galaxy Gear Only Partway There

    The Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch poses unique problems due to the tiny touchscreen. The use of gestures and streamlining content are reasonable solutions, but need to be implemented in a more usable manner.

  • State the Price to Give B2B Sites a Competitive Advantage

    Prospective customers want to know the price as their #1 info need on any website — including B2B sites, but these sites often hide or obscure pricing information.

  • Suggested-Employee Search—The Best Intranet Design Today—Could Save Your Organization Half a Million Dollars

    Searching for colleagues is the most common task that employees do on intranets, and is arguably the most important task. Forms, news, and apps aid employee productivity, but you can't beat talking with the right people. Today's design patterns for intranet employee search make the act of finding people outrageously fast and easy.

  • Conversion Rates

    Increased conversion is one of the strongest ROI arguments for better user experience and more user research. Track over time, because it's a relative metric.

  • 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design

    Jakob Nielsen's 10 general principles for interaction design. They are called "heuristics" because they are broad rules of thumb for UX and not specific usability guidelines.

  • Empathy Mapping: The First Step in Design Thinking

    Empathy maps help UX teams visualize user attitudes and behaviors, building a shared understanding of end users while highlighting gaps in existing user data.

  • Journey Mapping 101

    A journey map is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal.

  • How to Conduct a Heuristic Evaluation

    Step-by-step instructions to review your product to find potential usability and experience problems. Download a free heuristic evaluation template.

  • When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods

    Modern day UX research methods answer a wide range of questions. To know when to use which method, each of 20 methods is mapped across 3 dimensions and over time within a typical product-development process.

  • Service Blueprints: Definition

    Service blueprints visualize organizational processes in order to optimize how a business delivers a user experience.

  • Design Thinking 101

    Design thinking is a user-centered process that helps teams understand needs, generate ideas, test solutions, and drive innovation.

  • Usability (User) Testing 101

    UX researchers use this popular observational methodology to uncover problems and opportunities in designs.

  • User Interviews: How, When, and Why to Conduct Them

    User interviews have become a popular technique for getting user feedback, mainly because they are fast and easy. Use them to learn about users’ perceptions of your design, not about its usability.

  • Usability 101: Introduction to Usability

    Usability makes designs easy, efficient, and satisfying to use. Improve it through early, repeated user testing with real users

  • User Journeys vs. User Flows

    User journeys and user flows both describe processes users go through in order to accomplish their goals, but they differ in scope, purpose, and format.

  • Affinity Diagramming for Collaboratively Sorting UX Findings and Design Ideas

    Use affinity diagramming to cluster and organize research findings or to sort design ideas in ideation workshops.

  • UX Research Cheat Sheet

    User research can be done at any point in the design cycle. This list of methods and activities can help you decide which to use when.

  • Using “How Might We” Questions to Ideate on the Right Problems

    Constructing how-might-we questions generates creative solutions while keeping teams focused on the right problems to solve.

  • Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26

    iOS 26’s visual language obscures content instead of letting it take the spotlight. New (but not always better) design patterns replace established conventions.

  • User-Interface Elements: Glossary

    Use this glossary to quickly clarify definitions for key graphical user-interface elements and controls.

  • Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users

    Elaborate usability tests are a waste of resources. The best results come from testing no more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford.

  • Card Sorting: Uncover Users' Mental Models for Better Information Architecture

    In a card-sorting study, users organize topics into groups. Use this research method to create an information architecture that suits your users' expectations.

  • Open-Ended vs. Closed Questions in User Research

    Open-ended questions result in deeper insights. Closed questions provide clarification and detail, but no unexpected insights.

  • The Definition of User Experience (UX)

    "User experience" encompasses all aspects of the end-user's interaction with the company, its services, and its products.